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The language is tough love, and I think it's important despite what the first respondent has said. Much of the language used seems to stem from nauseating inte

The language is tough love, and I think it's important despite what the first respondent has said. Much of the language used seems to stem from nauseating interactions that have occured in kernel world around rust usage. I'm not a big fan of rust for reasons that were not brought up during the kernel discussions, but I'm also not an opponent of moving forward. I don't quite understand the pushback against memory safe languages and defensiveness against adopting modern tooling/languages

lelanthran 11mo ago
The pushback is against the acolytes not the language. If you could separate the language from the acolytes it would have seen much faster adoption.
- kaoD 11mo ago
  In my experience from these threads, there are more people polluting the discussion by complaining about Rust "acolytes" than actual acolytes. Rust haters seem strangely obsessed.
  - lelanthran 11mo ago
    > Rust haters seem strangely obsessed. Well, this is a great example. People complaining about the community are labeled as people complaining about the language. Do you not see the problem here?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - whilenot-dev 11mo ago
      I think you'd need to give answer to your own questioning here... why did you take "Rust haters" as "Rust-language haters", and not as "Rust-community haters"?
      - lelanthran 11mo ago
        > I think you'd need to give answer to your own questioning here... why did you take "Rust haters" as "Rust-language haters", and not as "Rust-community haters"? Because it literally says "Rust haters"; not "Rust community haters". Are you saying that when someone refers to "Rust", they mean the community and not the language?
        whilenot-dev 11mo ago
        Yes, you're half way there.
    - timeon 11mo ago
      If you change it to "Rust community haters seem strangely obsessed.", it is still valid.
      - lelanthran 11mo ago
        > If you change it to "Rust community haters seem strangely obsessed.", it is still valid. Maybe. What does that have to do with the Rust community having such a poor reputation compared to other communities?
    - tayo42 11mo ago
      Rust language and rust community are intertwined. It's a design descion from the language creators
- testdelacc1 11mo ago
  Acolytes being the people talking positively about their experience using a language and the strengths they think it has. So the people with positive opinions should say nothing at all, and the people with negative opinions should be free to share. And somehow, you think this will lead to faster adoption. That’s an interesting thought. It would run counter to everything we know about human nature, but interesting nevertheless. Rust is already pretty successful adoption wise. It’s powering significant parts of the internet, it’s been introduced in 3 major operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android), many successful companies in a variety of domains have written their entire tech stack in it. Adoption as measured by crates.io downloads has doubled every year for the last 10 years. Now I’m imagining how much more widely Rust would be used if they had adopted your visionary approach of never saying anything positive about it.
  - lelanthran 11mo ago
    > Acolytes being the people talking positively about their experience using a language and the strengths they think it has. No, it's the people who have given rise to the multiple Rust memes over the years. I'm battling to think of any other about-to-go-mainstream language that had the reputation of a hostile community. Scala? Kotlin? Swift? Zig? None of those languages have built such poor reputations for their communities. After all, for quite a few years every thread on forums that mentioned C or C++ was derailed by Rust proponents. I didn't see C++ users jumping into Rust threads posting attacks, but there are many examples of Rust users jumping into C++ or C threads, posting attacks. > That’s an interesting thought. It would run counter to everything we know about human nature, but interesting nevertheless. Well, the fact that Rust is an outlier in this sample should tell you everything you need to know; other up-and-coming languages have not, in the past, gotten such a reputation.
    - testdelacc1 11mo ago
      > I'm battling to think of any other about-to-go-mainstream language that had the reputation of a hostile community. Because you’re young or you weren't around in 2010 when Go was gaining adoption. Same shit back then. People said “I like the language, it’s quite useful” followed by tirades from people who thought it was the end of human civilisation. It had exactly the reputation you speak of. (“DAE generics???”) Eventually the haters moved on to hating something else. That’s what the Rust haters will do as well. When Zig reaches 1.0 and gains more adoption, the haters will be out in full force.
- nicoburns 11mo ago
  > If you could separate the language from the acolytes it would have seen much faster adoption. Good news: you can. And that's why it has had fast adoption. (those advocating for Rust in "meme-like" ways are not generally the same people actually developing the Rust compiler or the core parts of it's ecosystem)
uecker 11mo ago
I think the spin that Rust is necessarily the way forward is what is wrong. IMHO Rust has severe problems and what is considered "modern" is mostly taste. We have seen the same thing in the past with a push towards C++, Java, managed languages. What is new is that the free software movement is now controlled so much by corporate interests that some of these changes are pushed through aggressively against the interests of other parts of the community. In the past, if you wanted something changed and there was no agreement, you created a fork and if it was truly better it was eventually adopted by the majority. Nowadays, the companies which fund most of the development aggressively pursue their interests and the part of the community that disagrees is forced out. This justified by with suitable propaganda "not willing to adapt", etc. The whole point of free software should be that I do not have to adapt to some companies's idea of what is modern, if I do not want to. This is why I fled from Microsoft.
- Mond_ 11mo ago
  > IMHO Rust has severe problems and what is considered "modern" is mostly taste. Really? As opposed to e.g. C or C++ (as the most important languages which Rust is competing with)? Sure, taste plays into everything, but I think a lot of people work with Rust since it's genuinely a better tool. I hear you on free software being controlled by corporate interests, but that's imo a separate discussion from how good Rust is as a language.
  - noosphr 11mo ago
    I'm very happy with common lisp for fast code. Of course most people aren't smart enough for the language so they have to use inferior algol languages like rust.
    - AlotOfReading 11mo ago
      No need to sully CL with this kind of elitism. Any language you need to be a genius to use is a bad language. That's one of the fundamental issues with C. We're all imperfect idiots some of the time and one instance of undefined behavior breaks any guarantees the language gives you.
tcfhgj 11mo ago
I haven't either, until I read comments on Rust in Linux on social media outside HN. Apparently, Rust is part of the "woke agenda"
- hofrogs 11mo ago
  Yep, I noticed that under a lot of videos mentioning rust in kernel, or rust in general there's a high chance that the comment section will just be straight up lifted from 4chan pol or a similar place
  - hsbauauvhabzb 11mo ago
    Is there any particular reason for this? Do they not agree with the code of conduct more than normal?
    - noisem4ker 11mo ago
      Complete disagreement with codes of conduct and the typical political orientation of their proponents. Also, pure contrarian spirit.
- alt187 11mo ago
  People are (understandably) sick of the fact that for whatever reason, the biggest proponents of Rust are insufferable. Personally, I'm simply bothered by the fact that (one of?) the most famous figure of Rust on Linux and Rust Forever consumes and advocates for pornography that's illegal in my country, without being held accountable by the community. From what I could piece together, the only group who ever cried wolf about this is a forum full of contemptious little angry men who spend weeks researching people they hate on the internet. No one seems to want to touch the subject from fear of being associated with them. I'll give it to you, this is not a great time.
  - JuniperMesos 11mo ago
    I'm genuinely not sure who you're talking about or whether this is an accurate characterization of their views. For that matter, I'm not sure what country you're in and whether I myself agree with that country's laws about whatever kind of pornography this is. Certainly plenty of countries I don't live in and have no ties to have laws I disagree with or violate routinely. I'm pretty suspicious of demands for communities to hold people accountable, especially when the community in question is a loose group of people who mostly communicate online and are united by their shared use of a specific programming technology; and who probably disagree on all sorts of other issues, including contentious ones.
TheChaplain 11mo ago
[flagged]
- Ygg2 11mo ago
  Tell me you haven't used Rust without telling me you haven't used Rust.
- mrweasel 11mo ago
  For me it actually is the language. While a little pushy at times I think the arguments for rewriting certain things in a safer language is well founded. If the apt tool chains is one of those places I'll leave for the Debian developers to determine, but for decompression tools I can see a benefit. If Rust should be the language of choice, preferably not. The syntax is awful, the language is complicated and Rust programs seems to collect dependencies at the same rate as JavaScript. Where I might agree with you is that Rust seems to attract a certain type of people. They write absolutely brilliant software, but like the Rust compile, they are rather particular with what input they'll accept. In the end I don't really care what apt is written in, I'm not the one writing the code. I just use the tool. It would be sad if some platforms are left behind, because the Rust developers don't care about them and not because they're no longer useful.
  - hulitu 11mo ago
    > While a little pushy at times I think the arguments for rewriting certain things in a safer language is well founded. Yes. It is. Just write the code and show us that it is good.
- bmicraft 11mo ago
  Ironically, the people hating on it (and usually without any technical arguments) act way more cultish. At least it looks that way to my not-rust-using self
hulitu 11mo ago
> I don't quite understand the pushback against memory safe languages As far as i read on HN, the only memory safe language discused on HN is rust and mostly with childish pro arguments.
- zozbot234 11mo ago
  Java and C# are memory safe languages, as are common interpreted languages like Python and Ruby. Even JavaScript is memory safe, barring the possibility of subtle JIT bugs that may practically impact such safety.
  - kaoD 11mo ago
    But op means memory and data safe, without a GC nor a runtime, so it can be used as a systems programming language. For "some reason" people only talk about Rust in this space!
    - zozbot234 11mo ago
      Swift is also memory safe in that sense.
      - hypeatei 11mo ago
        Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) which is a form of garbage collection.
        kaoD 11mo ago
        Now I'm curious, how does it GC cycles, if at all? EDIT: from a brief search: it doesn't.
        kaoD 11mo ago
        Not sure why you're downvoted, RC is definitely a form of GC even if not a tracing GC.
      - 11mo ago
krater23 11mo ago
The pushback comes from the idea to rewrite all old tools in another language just because you can. Instead of creating new projects and using the new language it feels like the most rust projects are rewrite from old projects. And the most projects you have read about on hacker news in the last year 'I made xy, but in rust' are already abandoned. It's just a trend to write something already existing in Rust just to learn the language and then release it for productive use.

lelanthran 11mo ago

The pushback is against the acolytes not the language. If you could separate the language from the acolytes it would have seen much faster adoption.

kaoD 11mo ago
In my experience from these threads, there are more people polluting the discussion by complaining about Rust "acolytes" than actual acolytes. Rust haters seem strangely obsessed.
- lelanthran 11mo ago
  > Rust haters seem strangely obsessed. Well, this is a great example. People complaining about the community are labeled as people complaining about the language. Do you not see the problem here?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - whilenot-dev 11mo ago
    I think you'd need to give answer to your own questioning here... why did you take "Rust haters" as "Rust-language haters", and not as "Rust-community haters"?
    - lelanthran 11mo ago
      > I think you'd need to give answer to your own questioning here... why did you take "Rust haters" as "Rust-language haters", and not as "Rust-community haters"? Because it literally says "Rust haters"; not "Rust community haters". Are you saying that when someone refers to "Rust", they mean the community and not the language?
      - whilenot-dev 11mo ago
        Yes, you're half way there.
  - timeon 11mo ago
    If you change it to "Rust community haters seem strangely obsessed.", it is still valid.
    - lelanthran 11mo ago
      > If you change it to "Rust community haters seem strangely obsessed.", it is still valid. Maybe. What does that have to do with the Rust community having such a poor reputation compared to other communities?
  - tayo42 11mo ago
    Rust language and rust community are intertwined. It's a design descion from the language creators
testdelacc1 11mo ago
Acolytes being the people talking positively about their experience using a language and the strengths they think it has. So the people with positive opinions should say nothing at all, and the people with negative opinions should be free to share. And somehow, you think this will lead to faster adoption. That’s an interesting thought. It would run counter to everything we know about human nature, but interesting nevertheless. Rust is already pretty successful adoption wise. It’s powering significant parts of the internet, it’s been introduced in 3 major operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android), many successful companies in a variety of domains have written their entire tech stack in it. Adoption as measured by crates.io downloads has doubled every year for the last 10 years. Now I’m imagining how much more widely Rust would be used if they had adopted your visionary approach of never saying anything positive about it.
- lelanthran 11mo ago
  > Acolytes being the people talking positively about their experience using a language and the strengths they think it has. No, it's the people who have given rise to the multiple Rust memes over the years. I'm battling to think of any other about-to-go-mainstream language that had the reputation of a hostile community. Scala? Kotlin? Swift? Zig? None of those languages have built such poor reputations for their communities. After all, for quite a few years every thread on forums that mentioned C or C++ was derailed by Rust proponents. I didn't see C++ users jumping into Rust threads posting attacks, but there are many examples of Rust users jumping into C++ or C threads, posting attacks. > That’s an interesting thought. It would run counter to everything we know about human nature, but interesting nevertheless. Well, the fact that Rust is an outlier in this sample should tell you everything you need to know; other up-and-coming languages have not, in the past, gotten such a reputation.
  - testdelacc1 11mo ago
    > I'm battling to think of any other about-to-go-mainstream language that had the reputation of a hostile community. Because you’re young or you weren't around in 2010 when Go was gaining adoption. Same shit back then. People said “I like the language, it’s quite useful” followed by tirades from people who thought it was the end of human civilisation. It had exactly the reputation you speak of. (“DAE generics???”) Eventually the haters moved on to hating something else. That’s what the Rust haters will do as well. When Zig reaches 1.0 and gains more adoption, the haters will be out in full force.
nicoburns 11mo ago
> If you could separate the language from the acolytes it would have seen much faster adoption. Good news: you can. And that's why it has had fast adoption. (those advocating for Rust in "meme-like" ways are not generally the same people actually developing the Rust compiler or the core parts of it's ecosystem)

uecker 11mo ago

I think the spin that Rust is necessarily the way forward is what is wrong. IMHO Rust has severe problems and what is considered "modern" is mostly taste. We have seen the same thing in the past with a push towards C++, Java, managed languages. What is new is that the free software movement is now controlled so much by corporate interests that some of these changes are pushed through aggressively against the interests of other parts of the community. In the past, if you wanted something changed and there was no agreement, you created a fork and if it was truly better it was eventually adopted by the majority. Nowadays, the companies which fund most of the development aggressively pursue their interests and the part of the community that disagrees is forced out. This justified by with suitable propaganda "not willing to adapt", etc. The whole point of free software should be that I do not have to adapt to some companies's idea of what is modern, if I do not want to. This is why I fled from Microsoft.

Mond_ 11mo ago
> IMHO Rust has severe problems and what is considered "modern" is mostly taste. Really? As opposed to e.g. C or C++ (as the most important languages which Rust is competing with)? Sure, taste plays into everything, but I think a lot of people work with Rust since it's genuinely a better tool. I hear you on free software being controlled by corporate interests, but that's imo a separate discussion from how good Rust is as a language.
- noosphr 11mo ago
  I'm very happy with common lisp for fast code. Of course most people aren't smart enough for the language so they have to use inferior algol languages like rust.
  - AlotOfReading 11mo ago
    No need to sully CL with this kind of elitism. Any language you need to be a genius to use is a bad language. That's one of the fundamental issues with C. We're all imperfect idiots some of the time and one instance of undefined behavior breaks any guarantees the language gives you.

tcfhgj 11mo ago

I haven't either, until I read comments on Rust in Linux on social media outside HN. Apparently, Rust is part of the "woke agenda"

hofrogs 11mo ago
Yep, I noticed that under a lot of videos mentioning rust in kernel, or rust in general there's a high chance that the comment section will just be straight up lifted from 4chan pol or a similar place
- hsbauauvhabzb 11mo ago
  Is there any particular reason for this? Do they not agree with the code of conduct more than normal?
  - noisem4ker 11mo ago
    Complete disagreement with codes of conduct and the typical political orientation of their proponents. Also, pure contrarian spirit.
alt187 11mo ago
People are (understandably) sick of the fact that for whatever reason, the biggest proponents of Rust are insufferable. Personally, I'm simply bothered by the fact that (one of?) the most famous figure of Rust on Linux and Rust Forever consumes and advocates for pornography that's illegal in my country, without being held accountable by the community. From what I could piece together, the only group who ever cried wolf about this is a forum full of contemptious little angry men who spend weeks researching people they hate on the internet. No one seems to want to touch the subject from fear of being associated with them. I'll give it to you, this is not a great time.
- JuniperMesos 11mo ago
  I'm genuinely not sure who you're talking about or whether this is an accurate characterization of their views. For that matter, I'm not sure what country you're in and whether I myself agree with that country's laws about whatever kind of pornography this is. Certainly plenty of countries I don't live in and have no ties to have laws I disagree with or violate routinely. I'm pretty suspicious of demands for communities to hold people accountable, especially when the community in question is a loose group of people who mostly communicate online and are united by their shared use of a specific programming technology; and who probably disagree on all sorts of other issues, including contentious ones.

TheChaplain 11mo ago

[flagged]

Ygg2 11mo ago
Tell me you haven't used Rust without telling me you haven't used Rust.
mrweasel 11mo ago
For me it actually is the language. While a little pushy at times I think the arguments for rewriting certain things in a safer language is well founded. If the apt tool chains is one of those places I'll leave for the Debian developers to determine, but for decompression tools I can see a benefit. If Rust should be the language of choice, preferably not. The syntax is awful, the language is complicated and Rust programs seems to collect dependencies at the same rate as JavaScript. Where I might agree with you is that Rust seems to attract a certain type of people. They write absolutely brilliant software, but like the Rust compile, they are rather particular with what input they'll accept. In the end I don't really care what apt is written in, I'm not the one writing the code. I just use the tool. It would be sad if some platforms are left behind, because the Rust developers don't care about them and not because they're no longer useful.
- hulitu 11mo ago
  > While a little pushy at times I think the arguments for rewriting certain things in a safer language is well founded. Yes. It is. Just write the code and show us that it is good.
bmicraft 11mo ago
Ironically, the people hating on it (and usually without any technical arguments) act way more cultish. At least it looks that way to my not-rust-using self

hulitu 11mo ago

> I don't quite understand the pushback against memory safe languages As far as i read on HN, the only memory safe language discused on HN is rust and mostly with childish pro arguments.

zozbot234 11mo ago
Java and C# are memory safe languages, as are common interpreted languages like Python and Ruby. Even JavaScript is memory safe, barring the possibility of subtle JIT bugs that may practically impact such safety.
- kaoD 11mo ago
  But op means memory and data safe, without a GC nor a runtime, so it can be used as a systems programming language. For "some reason" people only talk about Rust in this space!
  - zozbot234 11mo ago
    Swift is also memory safe in that sense.
    - hypeatei 11mo ago
      Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) which is a form of garbage collection.
      - kaoD 11mo ago
        Now I'm curious, how does it GC cycles, if at all? EDIT: from a brief search: it doesn't.
      - kaoD 11mo ago
        Not sure why you're downvoted, RC is definitely a form of GC even if not a tracing GC.
    - 11mo ago

krater23 11mo ago

The pushback comes from the idea to rewrite all old tools in another language just because you can. Instead of creating new projects and using the new language it feels like the most rust projects are rewrite from old projects. And the most projects you have read about on hacker news in the last year 'I made xy, but in rust' are already abandoned. It's just a trend to write something already existing in Rust just to learn the language and then release it for productive use.